Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
There are a few misconceptions about SEO that Tentacle’s Glasgow-based team always highlights to their clients. SEO cannot increase search traffic overall; it can only make your website more accessible to the existing market. This means that SEO cannot build a brand on its own. Setting SEO strategies as the only marketing goal is wrong, and you should not rely on anyone's strategy to raise brand awareness.
The key difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves “organic” ranking, which means you don’t pay to be in that space. Tentacle would urge your company to practice both paid and SEO but keeping in mind that your SEO strategy is for the long term.
Remember, SEO can take many months before your company’s website starts to see any results. However, in the long run, it will be important when you realize that people are willing to go to the top-ranked sites rather than the paid ads.
When it comes to broader SEO, there are two significant paths:
- On-page SEO is about building content to improve your rankings by incorporating keywords into your pages and content, writing high-quality content regularly, making sure your metatags and titles are keyword-rich and well-written, among other factors.
- Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off of your website itself, such as getting backlinks from prominent websites.
There are good and bad ways to go about SEO:
Good ways of doing SEO are:
- Good and relevant content
- Images that are well labeled
- Relevant links
- Standards-Compliant HTML
- Unique and relevant page titles
Bad ways are doing SEO are:
- Duplicate other website’s content (just don’t do this)
- Invisible text and keyword stuffing
- Links from other sites with non-relevant content
Finally, it is worth mentioning that even the best SEO in the world will be fruitless if your website does not answer the searcher's questions.